Tag: transgender

It’s Transgender Awareness week, in addition to being Post-Election-Hate-Crime-Hyper-Awareness week. I’ve decided that during this month of posting, I’m also going to keep my eye out for Proof of Humanity, i.e. when people do stuff that shows their compassion for other people, in spite of the forces that seem determined to quash tenderness among Earthlings.

Today I was fortunate to attend the Level 2 workshop offered by Egale Canada Human Rights Trust (of which I attended Level 1 last year). Again, some amazing discussion happened. It was calming (though emotional) to be in a room full of educators doing their sincere best to learn to be better allies and/or advocates.

I’m going to share a few things we saw and discussed today, in brief only. Being in Level 2, we got to go a bit deeper on certain topics, including non-binary gender identity. This brief TED talk, by a brilliant Canadian named Ivan Coyote, is so direct, so simple and beautiful, and so sad. It made many of us cry today – but more importantly, it made us think and care.

Then there’s this charming person with a smiley, loving take on LGBTQ+ labels that you know belies the painful struggles in their past.

Then, for all of us who are sick and tired of monolithic gendered toy aisles at the store, a rant from a very small person who feels the same way.

Finally, I am fiercely collecting the bits of proof that diverse, progressive people are going to continue to care about each other instead of fearing each other, despite global pressure to freak out and reject all kinds of otherness. I loved this quote from Stephen Marche in The Walrus last week, regarding Canada’s status as “the last country on earth to believe in multiculturalism”:

Canada’s relative position of strength—if that’s how you can describe not being overwhelmed by loathing for others—should not render us complacent. Quite the opposite. Right now, while we are not in the darkness, we must make multiculturalism work. We must make it work better and we must make it work for everyone.

Today is November 20th. It is International Children’s Day, which is well-known. Less well known is the fact that it is also Trans Day of Remembrance.

Last Thursday, I went to a Professional Development workshop on Safer and Inclusive Schools, regarding the LGBTQ community in our education system.

It was a fascinating day, led by an incredibly well-spoken guy from the Canada Humans Rights Trust organization Egale. This facilitator, as a gay man who is also black, had a unique perspective on otherness and marginalization. We, as teachers and administrators in both elementary and secondary schools, learned a lot, discussed a lot, and asked all the questions we had time for. Many new thoughts were provoked, for all of us.

Although LGBTQ rights and equity have come a long way in Canada in recent years, there is still a long way to go, especially regarding transgender and transsexual individuals, and gender non-conformism overall.

Our facilitator agreed, it’s a very complex topic to talk about, and unfortunately I’m not able to elaborate in this post on all the discussion we had.

For now, just try to imagine what it would feel like to know you were in the wrong body. Not just to feel different from the people around you, but to know that the gender you had been assigned since birth was not yours.

People in this situation are often forced to hide their true selves, because they don’t have safe environments to be who they are. And even those who are able to live in a manner consistent with their personal gender identity often end up dealing with discrimination and violence. Lives are lost every year in the trans community because of this.

If you’d like to learn more about issues facing transgender and transsexual people, please take a look at this list of Must-Read Trans Blogs at bilerico.com. I am also looking forward to reading the books that were recommended to us:

For today, I’m going to try to figure out a way to at least introduce this topic with my Grade 5-6 class – enough that, just in case any of my students might be fundamentally different from how I am seeing them, they’ll know there’s someone at school they can talk to.